The Sullenberger standard

It wasn't as dramatic as Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger landing his crippled airliner safely in the Hudson River last January, but another emergency landing this week also shows the importance of having well-qualified, well-trained pilots at the controls.

On Thursday morning, Continental Flight 61 was over the middle of the Atlantic en route from Brussels to Newark when the 247 passengers heard a call for a doctor broadcast over the address system. Five doctors answered the summons to the cockpit, but they could do nothing to save the life of the 60-year-old pilot, who was stricken with an apparent heart attack.

It's a tragedy that could happen anywhere, but in an airliner tens of thousands of feet in the air headed into a stormy New York metropolitan area, it could have been a disaster.

Fortunately, a relief pilot who was on board, as is the case for most transoceanic flights, and the co-pilot were able to land the plane smoothly, amid severely foul weather, at Newark-Liberty International Airport.

The passengers didn't even learn how dire the situation had been until they got to the terminal.

That's a testament to the back-up pilots' fitness and training, and to this major airline's insistence on both those qualities in the people who fly its planes.

That's not always the case, and lots of people have paid with their lives because some airlines put cost-cutting before safety.

Just a few weeks after Capt. Sullenberger authored his "Miracle on the Hudson," a smaller commuter airliner plunged into a house in a suburb of Buffalo, N.Y. Some 50 people, including one person in the home, were killed.

This doomed flight was nominally under the auspices of Continental Airlines , as well, but Continental Connection Flight 3407 between Newark and Buffalo, a Bombadier Dash 8 Q400 turboprop, was operated by Colgan Air, a sub-contractor.

It was headed to Buffalo in an ice storm, and the pilots apparently lost control of the plane and it dove straight into the ground.
As subsequent investigations have shown, smaller operators such as Colgan routinely take advantage of lax regulations to pay their pilots pitiful salaries and force them to work long hours. And they get what they pay for.

In the case of Flight 3407, none of the people in the cockpit were qualified to fly this particular airplane, much less fly it through extreme weather, because they were inadequately trained. On top of this, they were fatigued and distracted by a cockpit conversation on personal matters. As a result, they ignored critical flight data and made a series of fatal errors, including flying on auto-pilot when the extreme conditions called for manual control, causing them to lose control of the plane.

It didn't have to happen. A well-qualified, well-rested crew would probably have been able to bring the plane down safely, even in an ice storm. Fifty people would be alive today if stricter regulations were in force.

Now, the Federal Aviation is working on revising those regulations to ensure that flight crews on all commercial flights have the proper training and are in shape to fly before they get behind the controls. Essentially, the change would put the onus on all airlines, including on smaller airlines that operate commuter flights, to adopt the same training and safety procedures that the major airlines use as a matter of course.

That's reassuring to people who use these airlines, but we wonder how it got to this point. It appears deregulation fever of recent decades has left the federal government so toothless that airline operators were permitted to cut corners with impunity.

In fact, even if the FAA's adopts all of these proposed changes, they will still mostly be strong recommendations as opposed to mandatory regulations. Inevitably, there will be bottom-line-obsessed executives at the lower echelons of the struggling airline industry who dismiss the stricter regulations as unnecessary.

Considering what's at stake when large aircraft rocket hundreds of people at high altitude, airlines -- large and small -- should have no wiggle room when it comes to safety. The flying public deserves no less than a Sullenberger standard on all flights.